TRUMP, "THE SQUAD", AND THAT TWEET

Peter Radan (8 August 2019)

On 14 July 2019, President Donald Trump, a grandchild of immigrants from a country responsible for unleashing two world wars, sent out a tweet that targeted four American Congresswomen of colour - the so-called "Squad", three of whom were American-born children of immigrants, and suggested that "they go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came".

The Squad: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Rashida Tlaib, Ayanna Pressley, Ilhan Omar

In relation to Ilhan Omar - the Squad's non-American-born Congresswoman - at a Trump rally in North Carolina on 17 July 2019, the crowd chanted "send her back". Trump's 13 seconds of silence in response to that chant was widely reported as confirmation of his hatriotism.[1] What has not been reported is that, as Congresswoman Omar was the sole target of the crowd's chant, presumably both Trump and his supporters realised that the other three Congresswomen could not be sent back to "the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came" because they were already there.

In the backlash to Trump's nativist and racist tweet, many commentators correctly noted that this was not a new phenomenon in American politics and pointed to various examples going as far back as the formation of the strongly anti-Catholic, xenophobic, and anti-immigration Know Nothing Party of the late 1840s and early 1850s.

However, the sentiment in Trump's tweet goes back even further back in American history. Indeed, the practice of making, in the language of Trump, African-Americans "go back ... [to the] places from which they came", can be traced back to the middle of the seventeenth century.[2] And then there was Thomas Jefferson. In 1776, he penned the Declaration of Independence's assertion that it was a "self-evident" truth "that all men are created equal ...[and] endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights ...[such as] Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness". But, a few years later, in his Notes on the State of Virginia, he advocated relocating African-Americans "back ... [to the] places from which they came". For Jefferson this was necessary so as to avoid a racially divided society which, he wrote, "will divide us into parties, and produce convulsions which will probably never end but in the extermination of the one or the other race”.[3]

Following the American Revolution, the effort to achieve Jefferson's desired objective was undertaken by the American Colonization Society (ACS).

Established in 1816, the ACS was at the forefront of the nineteenth century colonization movement which, according to Matthew Spooner, became "a pervasive force in antebellum America ... [which drew] more support from white Americans than abolitionism".[4]

What differentiates the ACS from other nativist and racist groups in American history - and largely explains why it has not been the subject of much historical research nor noted in the commentary on Trump's tweet - is that its members and supporters were drawn from America's political establishment. Its first president was Bushrod Washington, nephew of George Washington and a justice of the Supreme Court of the United States. Other prominent establishment members and supporters of the ACS and its colonization project included: Presidents Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, James Monroe, Andrew Jackson, John Tyler, and Abraham Lincoln; Senators Henry Clay (the ACS's second president) and Daniel Webster - two of the three towering politicians of the antebellum era who have been aptly referred to as "heirs of the founders";[5] and John Marshall, the Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court.

President James Madison's ACS Membership Certificate

As Svend Holsoe has observed, "the diverse members of the ACS made for some strange bedfellows - Northerners and Southerners, slaveholders and non-slaveholders, merchants and evangelists, to name a few".[6] Nevertheless, as Fred Kaplan observes, "the glue that bound members together was their commitment to white supremacy and a black-free America".[7]

The ACS's principal objective at that time was to support the migration of free – not enslaved - African-Americans to Africa. For Henry Clay, their deportation was necessary because the "unconquerable prejudice [of white American citizens] resulting from their color [meant that], they never could amalgamate with the free whites of this country". Therefore, "it was desirable ... to drain them off."[8]

Although the number of slaves (approximately 2 million at that time) outnumbered by far the number of free African-Americans, the latter's number had significantly increased from 59,467 in 1790 to 186,446 in 1810[9] Notwithstanding that the overwhelming majority of free African-Americans were born in America, and in many cases had an American ancestry that went back further in time than that of many ACS members, what the ACS wanted was what Trump wanted for the four Congresswomen of color, namely, that "they go back ... [to the] places from which they came". According to Henry Clay this would be, as Kaplan points out, but the first step in solving America's African-American problem, to be followed by "the voluntary manumissions by anti-slavery owners, and as a distant though unemphasized possibility, government-sponsored emancipation with total compensation ... [so that] over a hundred years or more three to four million slaves would emigrate to a black homeland in Africa, the Caribbean, or South America".[10]

The ACS did not get anywhere close to achieving its objectives. Apart from attracting only minimal government support for its objectives, it also met with opposition from the growing abolitionist movement and was opposed by slaveholders who feared that that the ACS would seek to colonize slaves. And, most importantly, it was opposed by most free African-Americans who were overwhelmingly born in America and had no wish or desire to "go back ... [to the] places from which they came" because, just like the four Congresswomen targeted by Trump,"they saw themselves as having as much right to remain and be citizens of the United States as whites".[11] As a result, during the nineteenth century only approximately 20,000 free African-Americans settled in the ACS-established state of Liberia in western Africa.[12]

Monrovia, Liberia's capital city, named after ACS member, President James Monroe

Although the activities of the ACS ceased in 1892,[13] it was only in the 1960s that it was formally dissolved and its archives handed over to the Library of Congress.[14] Nevertheless, the ACS remained true to its founding mission throughout its period of activity, as is evidenced in its "Annual Discourse" delivered by Rev J Aspinwall Hodge in 1888.[15]

Hodge's peroration is worth quoting at some length. Having recognized the evils and horrors of the slavery that had been formally abolished in the aftermath of the American Civil War, Hodge made the following observation as to what the ACS saw as the American ideal:

"We welcome all, except the Chinese, to participation in our vast territories, our free institutions, wonderful opportunities, all rights and privileges, in our national life, to complete and perpetual identification. This is not a Siberia to which criminals are transported, nor as formally an asylum to which the religiously oppressed and persecuted may flee. Nor is it a Mecca or a Jerusalem to which the multitudes and tribes from time to time go up. It is the home of liberty, where men dwell in unity as one family, whose plenty attracts all men. They come voluntarily in ever increasing numbers, each to claim the rich inheritance offered to all. Here nationalities soon blend and become one people, as streams from distant mountains flow into one sea".

However, Hodge then went on to note that "the Negro" race "had no desire to come into our midst ... [and is] as isolated from ... the American people as [it was] two hundred years ago". In his justification for the relocation of all African-Americans to Liberia, Hodge went on to state:

"These two [races] cannot live together as equals. ... An unrighteous antagonism between the races, an ignoble history, an unjust prejudice, as well as a growing self-respect, anawakening ambition, and a loyalty to race, are causing the blacks to turn from a government indifferent, alike to the claims of divine justice, and to their pleas for security in the exercise of their rights for training for their citizenship. They are bethinking themselves of the land of their fathers, of the continent given by God to their race, and where their destiny is to be accomplished. This conviction is not at present very general. Nor could it be expected. Patient endurance of wrong has been highly developed by slavery. They have not yet given up faith and hope in Government. Personally, they have no fatherland, save this in which they are strangers. As a race they can recall no pleasant memories of Africa. ... They have scarcely heard of the Colonization Society, or of Liberia, the Christian Republic of Negroes, ... whose fascinating history, fertile lands, free institutions, equal opportunities and unclouded future invite them, where all questions of personal development and race loyalty and work are finding easy and satisfactory solutions. But this knowledge is dawning upon them and will produce its effects. For several years they have, unprompted by this Society, sent our Government petitions, yearly increasing in number and more numerously signed by colored men, praying to be sent to the land of their fathers".

Early Map of Liberia

Hodge then "quoted" what he believed the average African-American in 1888 would have said:

"We Negroes are in distress. We are burdened with responsibilities which are unendurable in our present condition. Our American citizenship is, by your indifference and inaction a sham. ... With you we cannot form one people, neither can our races dwell together on an equality. You do not want us here. You will do nothing for our relief in this land. Send us back to Africa to do our divinely appointed work. ... Start the emigration by government aid. And before long our people will leave you to the undisturbed possession of this land, and find their own way across the ocean to work out the redemption of dark Africa".

Spooner is undoubtedly correct in his assessment that the ACS's "rhetoric and premise – that black Americans do not belong in their home country – were overtly racist and deserving of the derision that has been heaped upon the ACS since its inception".[16]

Writing in 2014, Spooner also concluded that "today, in [America's] prisons and in [her] cities and in [her] wars, it is clear that the ideas that colonization represented – the isolation and removal of troublesome populations from the general populace, or America’s chosen place in the world – are as alive and palatable ... as they were when [the ACS was established].[17]

That nothing has changed in the five years since Spooner wrote these words is amply verified by Trump's hatriotic tweet and the rapturous support his base accords him.

Footnotes

[1] Samuel G Freedman, ‘There's an old word for Trump's brand of nationalism: “hatriotism”',The Guardian, 7 August 2019, available at <https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/aug/07/theres-an-old-word-for-trumps-brand-of-nationalism-hatriotism?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other>.

[2] Matthew Spooner, '"I Know This Scheme is from God": Toward a Reconsideration of the Origins of the American Colonization Society' (2014) 35 Slavery & Abolition559, at p 561.

[3] Quoted in Spooner, note 2 above, at p 561.

[4] Spooner, note 3 above, at p 560.

[5] H W Brands, Heirs of the Founders: The Epic Rivalry of Henry Clay, John Calhoun and Daniel Webster, The Second Generation of American Giants, Doubleday, 2018.

[6] Svend E Holsoe, 'American Colonization Society' in Randall M Miller & John David Smith (eds), Dictionary of Afro-American Slavery, Greenwood Press, 1988, 44 at p 44.

[7] Fred Kaplan, Lincoln and the Abolitionists: John Quincy Adams, Slavery and the Civil War, Harper Perennial 2017, at p 160.

[8] Quoted in Maggie Montesinos Sale, The Slumbering Volcano: American Slave Ship Revolts and the Production of Rebellious Masculinity, Duke University Press, 1997, at p 45.

[9] Jill Lepore, These Truths: A History of the United States, W W Norton & Co, 2018, at p 176.

[10] Kaplan, note 7 above, at p 170.

[11] Svend E Holsoe, 'American Colonization Society' in Randall M Miller & John David Smith (eds), Dictionary of Afro-American Slavery, Greenwood Press, 1988, 44 at p 44.

[12] Holsoe, note 11 above, at p 45.

[13] Edwin S Redkey, 'Colonization' in Randall M Miller & John David Smith (eds), Dictionary of Afro-American Slavery, Greenwood Press, 1988, 121 at 122.

[14] Library of Congress Information Bulletin, Vol 69 No 10, October 2010.

[15] Rev J Aspinwall Hodge, America and Africa, Washington DC, 1888, at pp 6, 10-11.

[16] Spooner, note 3 above, at p 560.

[17] Spooner, note 3 above, at p 572.